There is an increasing demand for more types of minimally invasive surgical techniques. Because endoscopic and arthroscopic surgery tends to result in lower morbidity than open surgery, the minimally invasive surgical techniques are very appealing to both patients and physicians. These technologically-advanced procedures include many forms of soft tissue to soft tissue repairs and soft tissue to bone repair. Examples of these procedures in orthopedic surgery include rotator cuff repair, labral repair, biceps tenodesis, and anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Other examples in other surgical subspecialties include, but are not limited to, hernia repair, hysterectomies, and laparoscopic gastric bypass.
Many of the above mentioned tissue repair procedures involve approximating the tissue to a bone by deploying an anchor into the bone, and tying the tissue to the anchor with a suture. In a number of suture anchors, the suture is passed through an eyelet located on the proximal end of the anchor and passed through the tissue. (See, for example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2002/0052629 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,370,662, where a suture is passed through an eyelet located on the proximal end of the anchor.) In order to use these suture anchors, however, the diameter of the hole drilled into the bone is generally in excess of 2.5 mm due to the need to manage four or more suture limbs, the anchor body, and the eyelet structure. While this may be acceptable in certain procedures, there are a number of procedures that would benefit from a smaller bone hole. For example, the procedure for reattaching the labrum to the acetabular rim in a hip repair would benefit by use of a smaller bone hole. It is therefore desirable to reduce the diameter of both the anchoring structure and the bone hole. Reducing the size of the bone hole and the anchor tends to make the tissue repair less traumatic and leads to a shorter patient recovery time.